Boat Passengers Lucky to be ‘Kidnapped’ by Gray Whale, Carried on Its Back in Mexico
Lory Barra was on a boat in a Pacific coast lagoon in Guerrero Negro on March 8. She filmed the 30-ton grey whale rising up and lifting the boat out of the water.
Passengers on the boat were left amazed by the once-in-a-lifetime experience.
This is the incredible moment a grey whale picks up a boat full of people on her back in the waters off Mexico.
The remarkable footage, shot in a lagoon in Guerrero Negro on the Pacific coast, shows the whale coming up to the surface underneath the boat.
It then appears to swim along close enough to the waterline to lift the boat out of the water, much to the amazement of passengers.
In the video, shot by Lory Barra on March 8, one of the passengers can be heard exclaiming: ‘She’s taking us for a ride!’.
Tourists were on a boat in a lagoon in Guerrero Negro, Mexico, when the female grey whale rose up out of the water.
Lory Barra caught the cetacean lifting the boat out the water and taking it for a ride into the Pacific Ocean.
The grey whale then swims along, carrying the boat with her, giving those on the boat a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Lory, who is from Manhattan Beach in California, said the whale played with people on the boat for more than two hours in what was an ‘extremely rare occurrence’.
‘She was having so much fun coming to us all for pets and kisses,’ she said. ‘Twice she lifted our boat gently onto her back and swam away with us.
‘She went fast enough to make a wake through my fingers. ‘I’ve been there many times and this never happens!’
She added that the whale even ‘turned to look at me a few times, and we had a soul-to-soul experience between two mammals’.
Excited passengers can be heard shrieking and laughing in the video, which was taken on March 8
Lory said: ‘She waved at me with her pectoral fin as she let our boat go, almost touching my hand. ‘She was double the size of our boat and weighed an estimate of 30 tons.’
Some grey whales can weigh up to 40 tons and larger members of the species can reach lengths of up to 50 feet.
The incredibly intelligent mammals have form for playing about with tourists in Mexico, with one curious whale ‘kissing’ a boatload of tourists last month.
On that occasion the grey whale lifted its head out the water and allowed people on the boat to touch and kiss it, before hilariously spraying them with water from its blowhole.
What are grey whales?
Grey whales are a type of baleen whale – which means they are filter feeders and do not have any teeth.
They extract food through ‘special bristly structures’ in their mouth, according to the World Wildlife Federation.
They spend much of their lives near the shore feeding in shallow waters, though they do an annual 12,000-mile round trip migration.
The grey whale does not have a dorsal fin and instead has a hump and a ridge of sharp bumps along their back.
In late May or early June, grey whales swim to their summer feeding grounds off the Russian coast.
In autumn, they head to the South China saw before returning to the US west coast and Mexico to breed and have their calves.
The young whales spend their time in lagoons where they avoid the attentions of killer whales.
The grey whale can eat 1,200kg of food in a single day and is classed as Critically Endangered, having been almost wiped out by commercial fishing in the mid 20th century.
